


Cherished Father

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [16]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, One Shot, Power Swap, Ward Taylor Hebert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-06
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:27:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23040073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Taylor lives in the shadow of her father's legacy.This isn't a good thing, not when your father could control cities.
Relationships: Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver & Ethan | Assault
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 1
Kudos: 88





	Cherished Father

**Author's Note:**

> Danny isn't Heartbreaker in this. Instead, he triggers with the mass anger/antipathy power that Wildbow genned for a possible Danny trigger, and this is the end result to that. 
> 
> Also, Cherish didn't end up with bug powers because I'm frankly far too lazy to find a way to justify that.
> 
> This is a Cherish power swap, for those who aren't already aware.

It was exhausting, knowing what people felt about you, about people you loved. Dean had it easy, Taylor sometimes thought, because at least his ability was restricted to line-of-sight, and as far as she could tell, came with significantly less detail, or maybe just it came down to how each of them interpreted “emotion”.

Dean wasn’t really important, though, not right now.

Brockton Bay breathed in exuberance, for miles in all directions, as people no doubt tuned into the radio or their televisions, people felt _good_ . They felt vindicated, validated, relief and giddy happiness, with remnants of fear, terror and self-loathing echoing behind it, a lonesome cello playing against a foreground of heavy brass instruments. Her head throbbed in protest, long sharp pangs of agony that forced her to curl in further, the noise impossible to ignore, to look away from. The only way she’d be able to avoid all of this was if she moved to another city, or barring that moved a city’s distance away from Brockton into the boonies, where the population density was low enough that her power couldn’t jump between people to map out the emotional status of entire _fucking_ cities.

The news still continued to blare on in the background, the second anniversary of her father’s capture and subsequent trial, a thing that landed him in the Birdcage. Antipath was the name they’d given him when he refused to give one for himself; a Master whose range was measured in _miles_ , who had the ability to inflict unnatural anger, irritation, and antagonism on everyone and thing, including animals, in his range, and then direct it at a target of his choosing. He killed five people in that way, one of which was the owner of Medhall, another being a politician who had a history of union busting. They never bothered to hide his identity, in the end, his trial was incredibly public by virtue of his closest contemporaries being Heartbreaker and Nilbog, and nobody really wanted to miss a ‘big threat’ going to jail for the rest of his life.

Everyone knew his name, everyone knew _her_ name, too.

A tired sigh escaped her, shaky fingers combing through the tangled knots around her short-cut hair, brushing the fringes free of her ears. The sides had been shaved after the fire that took her house had also taken large chunks of her hair, and after a certain point she decided to avoid wearing it long again. Less chance of something happening to it, or for that something to require another drastic change in her appearance.

Sparing the Wards area a look from between cracked eyes, Taylor nearly flinched as a stab of pain dragged blunted nails across the surface of her brain. _Fuck_ bright white lights, fuck the noise, fuck the city _celebrating_ today, on her fucking _birthday_ , because poetic irony was only so funny until the daughter of the serial killer _also_ triggers and gets drafted into the Wards under some archaic law relating to ‘preventing powerful abilities from villainous families to return to the fold’, or whatever it had been. It’d been years, literally, a few months from now and she would’ve been with the Wards and under the heavy thumb of the PRT for two whole years of her miserable _fucking_ headache-addled existence.

Then again, considering how Canary ended up, the alternatives to being a large-scale empathy Thinker and a emotion-manipulation Master in the Wards usually meant going to the Birdcage, so she wasn’t about to throw stones at the people with containment foam canisters, so to speak.

Tightening her hand into a fist, Taylor clamped her eyes shut and cycled her breathing, gradual inhales, sharp exhales. She focused on the rise and fall of her chest, the jerky spasms in her thigh, the musical notes that sat heavy on the edge of her awareness pulling away, now that she wasn’t paying them direct attention. The weight in her skull, the one that made it feel like it was sloshing around inside, lifted ever-so-slightly, that insurmountable pressure beginning to pull away, reminiscent of what it felt like when her sinuses cleared after a bad allergic reaction to something in the air.

Finally, Taylor opened her eyes again. The Wards area was still too bright, too much white with too many bright, uncovered bulbs that seared hot, agonizing patches of her brain away, but she could at least stand to have her eyes open, which meant she was steadily moving away from cluster headache territory and more into bog standard migraine territory, not that she was about to complain about things getting _better._

Then again, her headache was Director Piggot’s fault, or at least she had strong enough reasoning to believe Piggot chose yesterday to do long-form reconnaissance on Merchants through her power. Her headaches weren’t usually this bad, she could actually exist pretty normally unless otherwise told to rely heavily on her powers, to dip into the city-scale empath abilities she had. She could still use the ability even when not focused on them, in large part because there was no real way to turn them off, and focusing on them was just so that she could separate the sound each person makes at a distance, something she didn’t need to do when close to someone unless she was in a large enough crowd, and even then the amount of focusing she had to do in those cases was minimal at best.

But, in large part due to the fact that they wanted to ‘discourage use of the secondary traits of her ability’—as though her power was anything but a Master power first, a Thinker second; the Thinker being there more to help facilitate the usage of the first, but whatever, they probably needed to tell themselves that to sleep better at night—she was never allowed out on patrol, and while in her own opinion she’d become adept at handling the console, her ability to track people across the entirety of Brockton Bay meant that keeping her on it had become less of a punishment and more of a PRT policy.

Regardless, it wasn’t exactly a secret that Piggot thought very little of her. Even if she wasn’t an empath and could feel the quiet sadistic pleasure a few floors in, bloated and heavy, no doubt sitting in that pompous fucking chair of hers in that over-furnished piece of shit office, she would’ve been hard pressed to remain ignorant when Piggot did very little to conceal her paranoia and complete and total anger towards her. Even _Dennis_ knew it, and while he hated Piggot on aggregate, he also didn’t realize just how much she tended to hate people with powers, at least not until he’d been in the same room with herself and Piggot during one of her earlier upsets about being refused patrol rights.

The soft, meandering rattle of small bells drew her attention towards the Wards door. Assault, she figured, if the blend of anxiety, worry and frustration was any indication. She hadn’t been bothering to track him with her powers, what with the Thinker headache that was currently blasting her focus to dust, but now that he was close enough for her to pick out distinctly against the press of loud brass, she at least knew where he _was_.

Of course, the shrill siren that was meant to inform the Wards they needed to get their masks on just had to interrupt her fledgling good mood and ability to have her eyes open. The world spun for one precarious moment as the pain redoubled, burbling first at the crown of her skull before, like a wet, almost soaking flush, spilled down her face, tracing the outline of her eyes, the spaces beneath her eyebrows. Her cheekbones _ached_ , her nose felt heavy and while she knew it would, her finger came away dry when she rubbed it beneath her nose, showing no sign of blood, regardless of how real the phantom sensation had felt. Her eyes fluttered shut again as the brass pushed in, sinking into her, blotting out the noise of everything else, people and places and things becoming _just so much keening_ , so much noise that was meaningless and worthless and _so fucking painful._

A paper cup so hot it burned was forced into her shaking palms, arms guided up to her mouth. The taste of coffee came to her in bursts, cutting through the spasming din of her headache, pushing away the ache, but never enough to fully dismiss it. After a few short moments of fumbling, careful hands guided a pill into her palm and guided that palm to her lips, forced between them and onto her tongue before being washed back by coffee. The world spun again as the hot, bitter taste and the somewhat-sweet taste of the pain medication mingled, spilling down her throat in one wave.

For a while, she just _sat_ like that, stiff and ramrod, the taste of coffee drying on her tongue, her gums, waiting for the wash of relief to come to her. She was so _tired_ of this, tired of being stuck in her head and manhandled by the whims of her power, by the threat of headaches used almost as a punishment for her own existence. Piggot’s emotions above now sung of a low burn of anger, irritation, dismissal; the notes plucked, not strummed, on something heavy, electric, a guitar or bass that had been tuned too tightly, pulled so taut it risked snapping.

Finally, whatever he’d given her kicked in with a sort of quiet breath. The world narrowed back down, the brass of Brockton receded back into white noise, distant but present, a reminder that people laughed and celebrated on the day her father had been put behind bars for the rest of his life. A dry noise escaped her, a rasp that sat somewhere between her attempt to say “thanks” and a groan, coming out something like “th’nkhs”.

The couch depressed a distance away, Assault’s presence chiming, wry humor sliding into his song as it picked up into a sedate, but nevertheless jaunty beat.

Taylor cracked her eyes open again, and while it was harder to keep them that way, everything sharper now, biting harder into the soft flesh of her eyes, she could at least manage to keep them open in some capacity, even if she had to leave her eyes half-lidded to do so. “Fuck,” she blurted, Assault let out a choked noise, one of his hands coming up to slam against the top of his chest, shoulders shaking in restrained laughter. “Jus’, fuck Piggot. J’sus.”

Assault’s laughter only hurt her head a bit, his breathless sputtering petering out as he tried to gulp in air, wordless noises escaping him like an inebriated duck. “That’s—that’s the first thing you say,” was what he finally got across, wheezing, somehow finding humor in all of this. “ _Fuck_ , in like this— _mother merc_ y—this _deadpan_ , this tired voice, no pain, just, ‘fuck’ spoken like a computer.”

Taylor made a noise, hoping that it came across as ‘yes, that is very funny’. Assault’s giggles eventually petered out, the silence that replaced his spluttering terse, almost subdued. The news still played on the television, however quiet the volume, her father’s last appearance in public shown. He stood, half-foamed, a collar around his neck meant to prevent power use, his shoulders taut, his jaw grit, his eyes steely. He looked resolved, looked like he was ready for the worse, and _proud_ of it, proud of what he did, proud that people wouldn’t be able to dismiss his actions, that people would never forget that, soon enough, another one of him would appear, with or without powers.

Something heavy settled into Taylor’s gut. Dad had stopped looking like that at home after Mom died, after the docks began to backslide, after a solid quarter of it was demolished by a fight between the E88 and the ABB, with the city refusing to let the union buy the rights to the land and instead handing it off to Medhall. The rest of the docks, after her father’s arrest, even if it’d taken two years to get to that point, had followed a similar theme, with the last forty percent bought out by the new owner of Medhall, privatized under the promise that they’d revitalize it through trade with Europe across the Atlantic, something that nobody with any passing knowledge on Leviathan or the status of the Atlantic trade routes would believe, even for a second.

However pretty the new wood and metal might be, there was no union anymore, no dockworkers; just people employed by Medhall.

No dad.

Taylor slumped, carded her fingers through her hair for the second time. She tried to think of a time when her dad had the energy he displayed when out as Antipath, when terrorizing people, and came up blank. She always did, she’d asked this question time and time again to herself, endlessly pondering over what it meant that her father looked so strong, had such an iron spine, when out as Antipath, and yet had failed her in almost every way when at home, where the emotional neglect had led to her being too weary, too tired, to bring the evidence of Emma and Sophia’s abuse to him. When had it all gone wrong?

“You okay?” Assault’s voice broke through her self pity for a moment, drawing her eye. He still sat where he was before, arms folded behind his head, eyes carefully locked onto the news, his face pinched and awkward. “I get things like this, y’know?” He spoke again, after a moment. “I don’t disagree with what they did to ‘em, but I do get what you’re going through. ‘Sides, I wasn’t about to leave you like this to be found like you were last year.”

Taylor’s face pinched instinctively. Last year had been bad, for sure. Piggot had pushed her hard the night before on any information on E88 deployment areas, she’d almost completely forgotten that it was the anniversary at that point, thought that nobody would _celebrate_ it, what with Brockton Bay’s culture of ignoring problems once they’re dealt with, but she’d been wrong. She’d woken up the next day, late into the morning, expecting to soak her headache after getting some coffee and hiding in the relative silence of her room until the headache faded, but then the _trumpets_ had started. The sound of joy, of vindication, of revenge sated.

Turns out, there’d been a small - but what grew to be impressively large - gathering in the middle of Brockton to celebrate the fact that they put someone like that away. Piggot had intentionally withheld the information from her, whereas everyone else was too awkward about the subject to tell her that it was taking place. The crowd had, at one point, shimmied closer to the PRT building and she’d spent most of the day catatonic due to pain, so unresponsive that even Missy had ditched her hesitation around her and called in a nurse. In the end, there was nothing wrong with her, seeing as she never went into shock due to the pain, but it had been such an extreme amount of agony that Taylor could barely remember the day, most of it existing now as flashes of terror and fear and horror as the song of triumph swallowed her up and dragged her down beneath the waves, slamming into her with unrestrained glee.

Taylor breathed out, shaky and hesitant. She reminded herself that even Piggot got shit for that, that the Youth Guard came down on her hard enough to draw attention to other Directors, some of whom had sympathy towards her plight as the daughter of a villain so widely hated, especially when coupled with her city-wide awareness of people’s emotions. For a time, Piggot was actually on her way out, the low threatening murmur of forced resignation had been, at one point, music to her ears.

At least, that was until someone high enough on the food chain came down and made it very clear that Piggot was going nowhere, but she was expected to never do something like that again. The one concession they got out of it - and thank god for that - had been the fact that Piggot lost authority over the Wards and they were—once again—returned to Armsmaster, after which the Wards were moved back to the Rig. It was really only that fact that prevented her headaches from reaching the truly awful heights they had before, the distance, however insignificant, helped just ever-so-slightly, helped center her, make it clear to her brain that she was separate from the city.

“I’m not,” she finally said, unwilling to let the silence linger. “Okay, I mean. I haven’t been in a while, but Piggot’s doing it again, setting me up for failure. What are they going to do when I age out of the Wards?” It was rhetorical, but Assault’s face pinched in a way that implied they had talked about contingencies for when that happened. “They have me under their authority _now_ , but eventually I will age out, I’ll be an adult, I won’t live under their roof. I’ll remain a hero, sure, I’m neither stupid nor inclined towards villainy, but they have to realize I have, what, _two years_ left? Maybe? At most? Before I join the Protectorate in full, and at that point I’m more than just a ward of the state, or a part of the Wards.”

Assault sighed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. He looked warier, tired. “They’ll probably try to get you into a contract that heavily restricts you, or at least Piggot might. It was somewhat the same with me, though they had justification on my end. I’m not supposed to say this, hell, I’ll probably get into considerable shit if they find out I mentioned it, but get a lawyer when the time comes? Do it discreetly, but get one.”

Taylor’s shoulders hunched, she felt tired, more tired than normal. The warm flush of caffeine had started to really kick in, but even with that, she just felt... Overburdened, stretched too thin. “I don’t want to have to fight with them for my rights,” she whispered, she felt like a child again, looking down at her mother’s coffin, watching her father be dragged from the podium, the rock that hit her when she walked out of the courthouse, thrown by the brother to one of the people who her father had killed. “I want to be safe again, I want to be somewhere where I can be productive as something other than a fucking _radar_ , I want to be able to be a person and have my powers and not have people start making noises about my last name. I want to be fucking _normal_.”

For a moment, the air was tense, full of that statement. Assault looked at her sadly, something old and aged about it, before finally his eyes peeled back to the television. Taylor slumped, brushed her thumb over her right eyelid, grimacing as it came away smudged with eyeliner, black and inky. She felt weird without makeup now, she’d spent a while getting used to it, relearning who she was, after her father’s death and her induction into the Wards. Part of it had been in hopes it would make them see her differently, different from the bookish, creepy girl she had been. She’d painted her nails black, framed her eyes with eyeliner, started wearing casual, less professional clothes. She’d aimed for a step before grunge, and had used it to hide how, even then, she’d felt so _tired_ , so defeated, helped play into the concept that she was lazy, that she was relaxed and calm and capable of coping with what the world had thrown her way.

She was, in a way. She was all of these things, but she really hadn’t been, not at first. Fake it until you make it had become something of a realized prophecy, an unwanted one at that; she’d felt herself change over time, the need to cover up the bags beneath her eyes, playing off her lack of energy as just not wanting to bother, instead of the yawning pit of weariness that it very much was. But she was who she was, and there was no real changing it, not anymore. She was comfortable like this, looking the way she did, people seeing and defining her for what she wore, how she held herself, and even found some levity in the somewhat bleak humor of genuinely valuing coffee more than her peers in the Wards.

She was a different person now, but then Brockton was different too, and so was Assault, and even Battery. She genuinely somewhat disliked Battery, largely because she along with Armsmaster and Dauntless looked at her like she was one bad day away from snapping and turning into her father, always wary, never letting her guard down, but as time progressed and Assault had taken time that he usually spent needling his wife to sit with her and just be a support pillar, an adult figure in her life that actually cared enough to ask if she was okay, Battery had warmed up to her too. It wasn’t a whole lot, and Taylor couldn’t imagine Battery meeting her face-to-face without her mask anytime soon, but at least the woman no longer thought she shared a similar zeal and vigor of her father, and had just been hiding it behind a mask of apathy and plastic.

Taylor huffed out a breath, drinking back the last few mouthfuls of her now-lukewarm coffee. Without commenting, Assault reached behind him and dragged out a shopping back which had, at some point, ended up with a plastic bow glued to one of its straps. He fisted the main bulk of it, grunted as he lifted, before handing it towards Taylor. A bit confused, she reached out and took hold of the straps, wincing as the full weight of the thing mashed her fingers together, before finally settling the bag down into her lap.

“Happy birthday, by the way. Battery even got you something, though she refused to be here for it.”

Taylor shot Assault an arched look, to which he shrugged, looking somewhat resigned. Deciding it wasn’t really all that important, Taylor pulled open the top, revealing a pile’s worth of bags of coffee beans, though none with names or labels she knew personally, and the glint of something ceramic down at the very bottom.

“I never told you this before,” Assault started, sounding more serious than he had any right to. Taylor paused, turned her eyes back towards the man, who was now looking off into the middle distance. “But, me and Battery got hit by your dad’s power a few times, even if ambiently. Neither of us took part in any fights while under the influence of it, but it always spooked her really badly. She’d been hit by the effect more often than I was when alone, maybe ten or twelve times in total? She told me once that the lack of control, the complete surrender to someone else’s anger and wants, terrified her. I think that’s why she’s uncomfortable around you, because to overcome that anger and fear, she dehumanized your father. She doesn’t use his name, refuses to even respond when I say ‘Danny Hebert’. It’s always Antipath. I think it’s easier for her, so, I get that this is weird and you’re bad with emotions, which is starting to become a worrying trend with empaths, but could you forgive her? Just for now? You’re a paradox to her, you being a person and having people urges doesn’t work to her, but she’s slowly coming around to it, alright?”

Taylor huffed, dragging her attention back to the bag. She reached down, fingers brushing over the ceramic, and pulled free the cup. It was rather bland looking, a coffee mug meant to resemble a beer stein in size and construction, made out of plain, off-white ceramic. The base of the cup was colored, in contrast, cool blue waves tipped by foamy whites, encircling the bottom, giving the impression of swirling waves. In very tiny font, down near the very bottom, was an artist’s signature. She couldn’t make out the name, or was even sure if it was an actual name and not a pseudonym, but it _was_ a signature, on a custom-made cup, gifted by someone who Taylor vaguely remembered did art in her pastime, if Assault was to be believed.

She caught Assault’s eye, his smile was fond, quiet, but knowing and almost conspiratorial; the mischief never far, even when he was serious.

Taylor let loose a sigh, cradling her new mug, rubbing circles into the handle with the flat of her thumb.

“Yeah,” she said quietly, refusing to take her eyes away from it. “Sure, I can understand that.”


End file.
